More than $70 billion is spent on TV ads every year. Making TV spots work harder is one of the ad industry's most discussed—and elusive—goals. Two-thirds of big marketers said standard TV ads became less effective in the past two years, according to a January 2008 survey by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research. For years, interactive television has been sort of a holy grail to Madison Avenue. To paraphrase an old joke, it is the future of media . . . and always will be.
In an effort to respond, some large competitors in the broadcast T.V. space are becoming part of on-line advertising networks, for example, Microsoft® entering the market by acquiring Navic Networks, an interactive cable company in 2008. This brings a focus on local shopping through zip code focused advertising. Backchannel (Hearst-Argyle Television)—ABC affiliate, has been focusing on behavioral targeting to be competitive in broadcast T.V. advertising. Canoe Ventures, a consortium of 6 major cable providers including Comcast, Time Warner, Cablevision, has also entered the fray. Cable operators, such as Charter, as well as their satellite TV rivals, all are experimenting with such advertisements. Their goal is to battle Internet media for ad dollars by merging a TV commercial's impact with former Web-only selling points, such as interactive content, ad targeting based on consumers' personal data, and/or precise effectiveness measurement based on how many people click on an advertisement for more information.
Therefore it would be of significant benefit to introduce a new advertising model designed to overcome the problems that TV advertisers face by making payment for advertising contingent on actual sales, while also allowing broadcasters reach out to their local market base of small-medium sized local businesses. Furthermore, it would be of significant benefit if advertisers could monetize their advertising populating both their offline, paper based media as a draw for online placements. Thus, it is desirable to provide an online contingent based Pay-Per-Transaction system to generate offline advertisement sales for T.V. advertisers and help them recover lost revenues and non-monetized opportunities, while also providing a risk free service to merchants.